Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (26 page)

For three days now the music had followed him like a
cloud, tormenting him at times, then receding, only to return
prayers later. The song had taken on a plaintive quality in that
time, and Uriel honestly considered the possibility that something
was terribly wrong with him, as Enaz was claiming that he could
no longer hear the sound. This revelation, coupled with the
continued absence of Ortis, who was now officially missing, having
failed to report in or return since the Purge four nights ago, sent
Uriel into a rage. He had sent his other officers and commanders
to find the deserter Ortis, and commanded every servant in the
estate to drop whatever they were doing and help him track down
the source of the humming.

Unfortunately, just as Enaz had reported, it appeared as
though the humming could not be heard by anyone save the
Emperor now. Uriel was convinced of two possibilities. Either the
world was going mad, or he was.

These disturbing events had proven too much for Uriel to
take, and this was how he found himself on the balcony of his
estate, flinging a dozen of his servants to their deaths for what may
be his own insanity. His own failure. But he could not be weak in
front of his servants. They required him to remain strong in body,
and in mind. And so he had no choice but to show them. To set an
example.

Now, with the brunt of his anger spent, and the serving
staff a dozen dead weights lighter, he determined instead to seek
out the location, or the fate, of Ortis as well as the source of the
humming by himself. Madness or not, he would get to the bottom
of this. He would find and eliminate the humming, or he would die
in the effort.

“Where is Ortis?” Uriel shouted. None of the remaining
servants, nor Enaz, responded.
He snorted in disgust, gathered his robes about himself
and stalked to the door, stomping back down to his chambers to
think, the humming following along behind him like the wafting
stench of death.

Catelyn sat, wrapped in a thin, worn blanket she had
brought with her from the Seat and she hummed tunes her mother
used to sing to her, thinking about her future. The blanket, which
had been stuffed in her back, was not soft on her bare skin, but it
was the only one that she had been able to cram into her bag of
belongings before she had set her roost afire. She hugged it tighter
around herself, even though it never got truly cold in the Empire,
but she was still chilled and drying off from the poor excuse of a
bath she’d had just half a prayer before. The thing she most missed
from her old roost in the Seat were her basins for washing.

She hadn’t been able to properly bathe in days, and finally
tonight she had learned that once a span, merchants were given
the opportunity to buy a supply of relatively clean drinking water
from the Imperial stores, which they then turned around and sold
for however much the people could offer. Supplies were limited as
a result, and Catelyn, as the newest resident in town, had to wait
until last before she could claim her ration. Fortunately for her,
the other residents must not have had as many marks, as there was
still enough that she was able to buy three jars. One she had set
aside for drinking, and the other two she had used to give herself a
standing bath with one of the clean cloths she had brought with
her.

She had considered all of her options while cleaning
herself and had come to realize that maybe she had been thinking
too linearly when it came to her choices. She realized that she
needed to start looking at her situation with different eyes, so to
speak. As her father had taught her, she started to look at her
problem upside down and inside out.

And when she did so, of all of the possibilities she
considered, it was the impossible option that stood out as her one
and only chance. That option seemed to be so far beyond the realm
of possibility as to be equivalent to making a wish and having it
come true, and that was to find a way to leave the Empire
completely.

That’s impossible
, the voice in her head chided.
But as the idea settled around her, something about it
clung to her conscious mind and wouldn’t let go. She carefully
thought through the ramifications of staying in Brunley, and
quickly realized that her odds of survival here, or anywhere within
the Empire for that matter, were almost nonexistent. She couldn’t
return to the Seat. She couldn’t go to any of the other cities within
the Empire. At least, none within the walls.
She’d heard stories of Canlis Point and Fort Baldwin to the
west, both part of the Empire but separated by distance and
unconnected to the walled hub of the central cities. But despite
their distance, none of the stories she had heard indicated that
conditions there were any better than what she had known. Still,
she wondered if she could disappear there, while still maintaining
the ability to ply her trade and make a living.
Or she might just find a place outside the walls, in the
wilds, to establish herself and live off the land. There would be
hundreds or even thousands of abandoned towns and villages like
the one her parents had once lived in. Certainly the Empire
ignored those now, having sealed itself away within the walls of
Uriel’s legacy. It was a slim chance, but even a slim chance seemed
preferable to once again returning to a life of begging and
scavenging, or worse, here in Brunley.
Catelyn was beginning to understand that her best hope
for survival lay beyond the impenetrable walls of Uriel’s fortress
Empire. In truth, pursuing this option, even in her mind, was still
terrifying. Catelyn would still need to go through the heart of the
Empire to get to the Grand Gate in Belkyn, and she had never even
experienced the world outside the walls and so had no idea what to
expect.
The Empire continually reminded its citizens of the harsh,
dangerous world outside; how the men, who had taken the name
of Uriel to rule over the people, had done so to protect them from
the evils of a world that feared them for their superior morality.
For all she knew, Uriel’s family and the other men who had ruled
the Empire for hundreds of sojourns were right, and all that waited
for her outside the walls was a world even more cold and uncaring
than the one she knew, or even just death.
But Catelyn weighed that against the fact that all that
waited for her inside the walls was also death. A slow, lingering
death full of suffering. As she pondered, she came to the
realization that she would rather take her chances with the
unknown, than to acquiesce to the whims of mad men and leave
her fate in their hands.
When her mind was made up, and despite the enormous
task she set herself of making the impossible possible, she felt an
ease come over her at her decision. In that moment of peace,
Catelyn searched the vaults of her mind, recalling everything that
she knew about the walls of the Empire.
When the first Emperor Uriel had taken control of the
Empire, long before her parents had even been born, the
construction of the first walls had begun. Catelyn had read the
history of the walls in one of the books her parents had managed
to hide from the Empire. Because her family couldn’t hide an
entire library in their small hovel, they had often chosen books
that were densely packed with information about important
things, and she remembered the stories they told, having read
them over and over again.
According to the book, the rulers of the Empire had
initially convinced the people that the walls were necessary to
guard against the wild savages of Pyrus to the North, populated by
tribes of people whom the residents that lived along the northern
border were in constant conflict with. City walls were built around
every center of commerce, to protect them from attack. Catelyn, as
she had matured and experienced more and more of the Empire’s
tactics and mind games, began to wonder whether such attacks
had even taken place, or if this had actually been a deception, a
move that was calculated to play upon people’s fears and foster
their innate distrust of those they didn’t know.
When Uriel II took over from his father in 973, after Uriel
I took ill just before the end of his days, he furthered his father’s
legacy and created the Channels. Continuing where his father left
off, the Channels connected each of the major cities of the Empire,
and the trade hubs, to one another without giving up the
protection the people “demanded”.
Uriel II managed to negotiate a treaty with Pyrus,
stipulating that as a concession for halting hostilities, a safety zone
would be designated between the two nations, so that no longer
would the citizens of either nation encroach upon the sovereign
land of the other.
Catelyn’s parents had taught her however, that the book
was not telling the whole truth in this matter. This treaty,
according to them, was little more than a ransom demand, as Uriel
II had staged a covert attack upon Pyrus and kidnapped the Pyric
King’s only son, bringing him to the Seat to stand trial for crimes
against the Empire.
The punishment for such a crime, then as now, carried
only one sentence; death, and so the Pyric King had no choice but
to comply with Uriel II’s demand. In the book, this was painted as
a major victory for Uriel II, but based on her parent’s views and
her own experiences, Catelyn had now come to believe that the
Pyric king would have been only too happy to have signed such an
agreement, seeing the madness that seemed to plague the Imperial
house of Uriel.
Finally, when Uriel III staged his coup at the age of
fourteen, killing his own father and wresting complete control of
the Empire away from the politicians, he ordered the last of the
walls, and in particular the “Wall of Regret” as it was later named,
to be constructed, effectively cutting off the Empire from the rest
of the world. She knew that beyond the four major eastern cities,
which were interconnected by the Channels, a number of forts,
outposts and other settlements still operated as part of the Empire,
but they existed only to serve the Empire in some fashion.
Uriel III hadn’t just finished the walls though. He had
built them up into monstrosities. Hundreds of paces tall, made of
smooth stone stripped from the quarries and mines southwest of
Aldus. Catelyn had, as all children in the Seat did at one time or
another, made attempts to scale one of the walls enclosing the Seat
but without a single hand hold or gap to place one’s hands and
feet, it was an impossible task.
Catelyn had seen the walls with her own eyes many times
as a child, and remembered how intimidating they were, rising up
into the sky and to the horizon on all sides. Every memory of her
life outside her home when she was young and when she’d had her
sight included those walls. They were always there, standing
behind everything, suffocating and smothering and unyielding.
Catelyn knew from the books she’d read and the stories
her parents told of their lives before the Seat, that there were such
things as mountains, and fields of wild grasses, and plains. She
had imagined them as a child, but she had never seen them, and
she thought she never would.
But as she sat considering her future, and how she was
going to live for the rest of her life, Catelyn promised herself that
she would one day feel the grass under her feet, and touch the
stones and the trees on the mountains with her hands, and breathe
in air that was not enclosed by stone walls. She would know these
things or she would die in the attempt.
The problem she faced, now that she had resolved herself
to this course of action, was access. The walls had been built,
Catelyn now realized, as much to keep its own citizens in as they
had been to keep invaders out. In fact, she actually believed that
the former had really been what was desired in the first place, and
the latter was simply the excuse to get the people to go along with
it. The Emperor’s Uriel I, II and III had designed and built nothing
less than a prison. A prison with only one entrance and exit: The
Grand Gate in Belkyn.
Catelyn had neither seen, nor sensed, the only gate in the
entire outer wall, but she had heard stories of it and how well
defended it was on the inside. Many of the stories she had heard
involved the fate of fences that she had sold her stolen goods to
over the sojourns, who had gone “missing” attempting to smuggle
their goods outside of the city walls. None of them were ever heard
from again, and so Catelyn had little hope of being able to sneak
her way out of the city.
But she did know that there were legitimate caravans on
regular rotations both leaving and entering the city. The problem
was, the Empire controlled every caravan in and out of the Empire,
and she was not confident that it would be as easy as simply hiding
herself away on one of their wagons. And certainly others had
thought of this before her. She could not expect to catch the gate
guards completely unaware. Even getting to the Grand Gate was
going to be an almost insurmountable obstacle.
Not only was Belkyn the most heavily militarized district
of the Empire with Imperial soldiers policing the streets, especially
now after the recent quelling of the “uprising” she had heard
rumors about, but it would also require her to return through the
Brunley Channel and pass through the Seat once more. She simply
didn’t like her chances of passing through the Seat unscathed with
the Empire likely on high alert and potentially actively searching
for her.
Catelyn didn’t completely rule out leaving through the
Grand Gate, but before she decided that was her only course of
action, she owed it to herself to at least look at other possibilities.
She considered briefly praying for an answer as she had for most
of her life since losing her eyesight, but wasn’t quite sure about her
faith in the Divines anymore; she had offered plenty of devotions
to them over the sojourns, and if she really considered her
situation honestly, she was forced to admit that all of them had
been ignored.
She still wasn’t ready to completely give up on her faith
quite yet, as she still had questions about what had led her to
survive in the face of such unbelievable circumstances, but if it was
true that some force had helped her to survive, then it seemed to
be completely arbitrary and undirected by any sort of divine plan.
A thought had been bubbling into her consciousness since
the day that she had arrived in Brunley and had experienced the
first of many puddles of brackish swamp water. She knew that the
Dun Marsh crossed over the southern edge of Brunley, and seeped
into the city somehow. She supposed it was possible that the water
simply seeped up out of the ground, but she idly began to wonder
if it wasn’t also coming from under the wall, such as through a pipe
or a drainage system. She had seen a map of the Empire in the
same book that had detailed the history of the walls, and like most
of her books, she’d memorized it.
She knew from that memory that the mapmakers had
indicated that the Dun Marsh continued past the walls to the east,
and all the way to the sea. And if water could pass under the wall,
perhaps there was a way for her to pass, either through a crack, or
a vent large enough to slip through in the other direction. She also
wondered about the southern wall. Brunley reportedly sat high
upon a cliff face overlooking the Wystan Sea. She decided that
perhaps a visit to both areas was worth her time.
She didn’t think that the possibility of finding anything
that could help her get out of the Empire was great, but she figured
that it couldn’t hurt looking at, at least. It wasn’t like her chances
for escape were particularly strong. Thinking about escaping the
Empire simultaneously filled her with hope and dread. Hope that
her future might be lived outside of the oppressive rule and
constant terrorizing of the Empire, but that was offset by the fear
that what lay beyond those walls may even be worse than what she
knew.
But she was becoming more and more convinced that
these fearful thoughts were not her own. That she, like every
resident of the Seat and the Empire, had been systematically
controlled for sojourns to think exactly this way, that the Empire
had set out to scare its own people into complacency and
obedience. If such a thing turned out to be true, as she was
beginning to suspect, it could call into question everything she’d
ever learned.
Even the books, which she had memorized and so
treasured as a child, could be wrong about everything. Was the
Empire simply one masterful lie after another, orchestrated by
generations to deceive an entire population?
If so, to what end?
she wondered.
Having one’s certainty slowly stripped away was terrifying.
She felt lost, and alone. And she wished that she could
walk down to the marketplace and talk to Silena. Catelyn had a
feeling she would have wise words to share with her. But there was
no use dwelling on what couldn’t be. She realized, as she sat
contemplating her situation, that she had no other choice but to
try escape.
Even if she died in the attempt, she alone would have to do
something to better her life. The Divines, if indeed they existed,
would not help her. She finally, slowly came to the conclusion that
all of her life, it had been her choices and her actions that
mattered.
If she was going to live, that was all up to her.
And as she resolved herself, mentally, to her plans for
escaping the Empire, she drew comfort from a very strange
realization: She had nothing left to lose.